The Odyssey finally lands, and Broomfield audiences won't have to drive far to see what Nolan's been building for years

Christopher Nolan movies have a way of turning into local events, and this one has been a long time coming. If you've been half-following the trades since 2023, you already know “The Odyssey” has been treated less like a summer release and more like an arrival, the kind of film theaters clear their biggest screens for. For Broomfield residents who like their epics loud, long, and shot on film stock nobody else bothers with anymore, this is the week that payoff shows up in local theaters.

The bigger story here isn't really the plot, it's the production. Nolan has spent his last several films chasing physical scale in an industry that increasingly fakes it, and “The Odyssey” reportedly pushed that obsession further than “Oppenheimer” or “Dunkirk” ever did, with real locations standing in for the ancient Mediterranean and a cast list stacked deep enough that half of it barely gets mentioned in trailers. Matt Damon anchoring a Nolan epic feels almost inevitable at this point given their history together, but surrounding him with Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron is the kind of ensemble that usually signals a director calling in every favor he's earned over two decades. That's the real intrigue going in: not whether Nolan can direct actors, but whether he can wrangle a cast this large into something that doesn't feel like stunt casting.

As for what it's actually about, Nolan and producer Emma Thomas have adapted Homer's “Odyssey,” following Odysseus (Damon) as he tries to get home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope (Hathaway) after the Trojan War, running into the monsters, gods, and detours that have made this story survive for roughly three thousand years. That's genuinely all the setup needed here. Anyone worried about spoilers for a poem old enough to predate the concept of spoilers can relax, but I'll still leave the specifics of how Nolan stages the famous set pieces for the theater rather than laying them out here.

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I'll actually tell you what I think. The numbers are about as good as this kind of blockbuster ever gets: Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 94%, with an average score of 8.7 out of 10, and Metacritic isn't far behind at 89. That's not a split verdict dressed up as one, that's about as close to consensus as awards-adjacent tentpoles come. When the Tomatometer and the Metascore agree this closely, it usually means the film is doing more than dazzling people with scale, it's actually landing as a piece of storytelling too.

Having sat with it, I think the reputation is earned. This is Nolan at his most confident, using that oversized cast the way a director should, giving each face a moment that matters rather than burying half of them in crowd shots, and letting the scale of the shoot serve the myth instead of overwhelming it. It's long, it's demanding in the way all his films are, and it never once feels like it's coasting on the source material's built-in prestige. My verdict: this is one of the best big-budget epics in years, a film that earns its runtime and its cast, and it's worth the trip to a real theater rather than waiting for it to shrink down to a living room screen. If you've got a few hours this weekend, this is the one to spend them on.

Facts verified as of September 2, 2026.